


Red to match your coffin lining

by blonde_kars



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Gen, M/M, this gets bloody and sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-05
Updated: 2018-03-05
Packaged: 2019-03-27 06:36:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13875234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blonde_kars/pseuds/blonde_kars
Summary: Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat itself, double damn it, because people knew their history and yet all shit happened once again. Again and again, lost in the madness of punching the wall and hoping somehow to not get bloody knuckles from it all.





	Red to match your coffin lining

**Author's Note:**

> you could say this is on the 'magic suit' genre. think kill la kill. except it aint sexy. there's some blood and grossness down there but it ain't to beat your meat to, buddy.

He has always thought that their story belongs more into a horror literature anthology than history books. Damn it, but hide it away under the false pretense that they’re product of the imagination of some sexist, racist white middle aged man, and not that real people did this kind of shit to other real people, that measures got so desperate that after all that was done, humans would never have the right to question if Omnics had souls, for humanity itself had lost theirs too.

Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat itself, double damn it, because people knew their history and yet all shit happened once again. Again and again, lost in the madness of punching the wall and hoping somehow to not get bloody knuckles from it all. Because history gives you ideas, too. History tells you of mad dictators as she births more under the desk, and it’s humanity who keeps putting the seed inside her in the first place.

Jack and him will manage being forgotten. They’re the last links to a chain that rusts under the ocean, and each day it pulls them closer to shore, until the day they will fall down and rust too. And while they haven’t talked in years, and Jack thinks him dead, and it’s better that way, Gabriel knows that once he gets to stare at Jack’s blue eyes one last time before his last breath, before the depth of the ocean blinds them, he’ll be happy to rust away.

They don’t have their suits anymore, so there’s no danger anymore.

And hell, if Gabriel had known, he would have pulled the plug much earlier on his. And he would have forced Jack to do the same to his. It wasn’t worth it. But once you looked back on it, SEP had the whole program; the muscle growth, the extra food, the unpleasant side effects, the exhaustive exercising, the brainwashing.

They hadn’t questioned it back then, too lost in the haze of being able to protect their planet from invaders. They still stutter when talking of it in a negative way, the conditioning is still there. Saying “it was the right thing to do” feels so much easier to spit out than “they fucked us up and threw us to the dogs, to see who would win”. But they’re big boys; they should be able to deal with their demons.

Until the moment they can’t.

Gabe’s demons go by the name of _ Ernest _ , and Jack’s are named  _ Valdemar _ . Codenames, obviously, but after a while not even their demons knew their original name anyways, and they had to hold on to something in the hopes of not losing themselves in Gabe and Jack’s own minds.

They weren’t supposed to know the names of each other’s suits, but after years in the battlefield and of countless painful fucking without lube in a half broken down tent because you thought you would never see a tomorrow and there was no way words would be enough for goodbyes, they had come to the conclusion of allowing themselves some shit.

The people in charge that sold them the tale that they were just a swarm of nanites, a breakthrough of science, but with high moral conflicts. And yet, necessary to win the war. It was far more painful and dangerous than SEP’s early stages, but what could have they said? ‘I refuse’? Bullet to the back of the head and into the incinerator. Few had survived SEP, and even fewer had survived up to that point of the war; they weren’t joking anymore about the kind of things they had done to keep up with the shit that kept rising up. No one would refused.

It had been liberating at first; with the suits activated, it felt almost like you could fly. Like suddenly you would turn one with the wind and finally escape. Wouldn’t have that been a good closure to it all, to simply melt into the greatness of the universe around you. Not that they would ever be able to achieve such a thing, they would have never given the suits to them anyways.

If Gabriel reaches right under the bump of his spine on the back of his neck, he can feel the smaller bump the needle left. Like forever swollen at this point, it wouldn’t have surprised him if a scanner had eventually found it to be a tumor. Not that it mattered, since nor tumor or cancer would ever be able to truly reach him now. He keeps the scar of the needle when he forms his physical body as a reminder, as the most simple reminder of them all.

_ Ernest _ had been lost in the war.

Or rather, Gabriel had lost it in purpose, and blamed the war on it.

It had been rather easy to turn the switch. The nanites were only kept bonded to their nervous system through some sort of electric bond, not that Gabriel wanted to know much more about them, and the simple flicking of a switch was enough.

It wasn’t even that well secured. He guesses, in case of an agent going rogue, you don’t want to make the takeaway process too complicated.

It was easy, and painful as fuck, but Gabriel could live with it.

And yet, after he felt like he was being turned inside out by the shock of the suit’s nanites leaving him, he hadn’t had the heart to tell Jack  _ what _ \-  _ who _ they were thruthly wearing.

There was a secret hideaway for comatose SEP subjects. The ones that hadn’t survived the round of injections, but hadn’t totally died or gone into a vegetable state. Only a few, the lucky ones that perhaps someday could come back to a normal life.

Or not. Not at all.

It had been strange, Gabriel recalls, how easily the bonding process with the suits had gone. The last bonding process he had gone through had left half of the SEP volunteers dead, just because their cells couldn’t adapt. And if the scientists were to be believed, they had never tried the suits in humans. And yet, there all of them were, bonded and ready.

Of course, it’s much easier to bond when the cells are human and serum-beaten already. In the same heartbeat Gabriel had learned of it, he wondered if  _ Ernest _ was indeed a codename or if it was the real name of the comatose soldier they had liquified to turn into a nanite suit for the subjects that had proven to be stronger.

But Gabe wasn’t strong in the eye of the storm. Jack kept  _ Valdemar _ with him for years, eventually taking him along to the seat of Commander of Overwatch. It was safer that way, they said, the suit was extra protection. Jack had become a fairly easy target.

Until, of course,  _ Valdemar _ wasn’t anymore.

As head of Blackwatch, Gabriel had spent years in secret missions trying to find the switch to Jack’s suit. And yet it had blown up on its own, in one of the abandoned SEP facilities that were closed off due to some bullshit like radioactive waste that wasn’t there.

Jack had coughed up blood for weeks after it.

In the worst days, he doesn’t even need to close his eyes; he sees it all, Jack on his fours on the pool of blood on the bathroom floor, crying from the effort it meant to even just let his body throw up, and lumps of red that in the moment looked a bit too much like  _ organs _ , but Gabe had never managed to check, because the first thing he remembers doing is grabbing those lumps of- of meat, of cells, and flushing them down the toilet. There was blood everywhere, no one would mind that there was some on the toilet too. 

And Jack vomited again, right on Gabriel’s boots. It was like SEP all over again, just that Jack wasn’t losing  _ half his kidney and a lung _ that were made of cells that suddenly seemed strange to his body and needed immediate rejection.

Gabriel had his own theory; he had only worn  _ Ernest _ for barely a year and so. Their bond had been strong, but they hadn’t been attached to each other. Jack had  _ Valdemar _ inside of him for almost seven years now; at some point, their cells had started to blend far too much for there to be such a clear line where Jack ended and the suit started.

Because things are never easy, he was surprised that Moira was so easy to recruit. It was rather too tempting, or she had a thicker sadistic vein than imagined.

She was, obviously,  _ fascinated _ .

What Gabriel was asking of her was a madman’s fantasy. But Moira was as much of a madman as him, and half the research had already been done for her, laying down in old, dusty SEP reports.

Liquefying Gabe wouldn’t even move one of her hairs. But to give him the ability to turn human again? Moira loved an impossible challenge.

If anything, it makes Gabe wonder- had he ever managed to become the suit Jack needed to survive, would it really made things better? Jack would have understood what the suits truly were, and if the shock didn’t kill him, then he would refuse Gabe’s help and die anyways.

Perhaps it was indeed better that way. Not that he doesn’t wishes he could have been inside Jack one last time before Zurich blew them to pieces. Ironic, how in their better days they would have dusted themselves off and keep talking after the explosion, because they had faced worse, much worse.

But Gabe had been falling apart to pieces, literally, he had left more right arms in his bed than what he would like to remember, and he couldn’t allow Jack to see him like that. And now, all Moira could do was try to fix him up with the data she had managed to save from the wreckage. But it was all so secretive, most of the old research had only been documented in paper, and old paper burns as easy as with just one mean look.

Who’s gonna give in first, he wonders. This chain rusting in the bottom of the ocean only manages to drag them so slowly because both Jack and him are doing a somehow collective effort to push on the opposite direction, trying to buy time, but as soon as one of them stops, it’s over.

But who knows if this isn't just a bad dream. They used to have a lot of those when they were going through SEP. Maybe it will be like that last mission before the suits, when Jack and him washed up ashore in one of the Caribbean islands, and got the small fantasy of some vacations in the beach until the rescue team got a hold of their signal and came for them.

He hopes Jack gives in to the chain first. He deserves a proper burial. Reaper will just dissolve into the universe around him and take fly once his time has come, but Jack Morrison does deserve a coffin.

**Author's Note:**

> i know, i know. if you, somehow, got this far, consider leaving me a comment and kudos, even if it's just to say 'i hope god punishes you for this'. once again, thanks to the twitter r76 community for their awesome threads that somehow inspire stuff like this.


End file.
